Bitcoin Core 0.13.0: What’s In The Box?

Preperations for Segregated Witness

The much anticipated Segregated Witness, or “segwit”, has not been implemented in this release, instead we see all the code preparations for it included. This means that node operators will be able to test segwit and see how it performs on the testnet. Miners and node operators that are interested in implementing segwit once it is activated on the mainnet, in a subsequent version of the 0.13 implementation, will need to first have installed 0.13.0 to have access to the BIP 144 implementation.

Improvements

Other notable changes include the dropping of support of Windows XT implementations. This follows Microsoft no longer offering even basic security upgrades for the antiquated version of their operating system. Anyone continuing running XT after this release is doing so at their own risk.

Compact Block support (BIP 152) has been implemented reducing bandwidth spikes in an effort to reduce network propagation lags among peer nodes.

Version 0.13.0 also implements Hierarchical deterministic key generation for wallets also known as Hierarchical Deterministic Wallets, or simply as HD Wallets as per BIP 32.

The database’s cache memory has also been increased from 100 MiB to 300 MiB, and it can be set at any value in between according to the memory constraints of the system the node is running on.

Mining transaction selection has been set to “Child Pays For Parent” which allows a transaction fee to be updated by a ‘child’ transaction, an improvement that will help clear the mempool of low fee transaction requests.

More performance improvements have been also included. Reindexing changes allows for blocks to be known before being validated. CPU mining has been removed from the code as it is now a long extinct practice. other low level changes have also been packed in with this release.

Get It On Your Node

An increasing number of nodes have are now running v0.13.0 as can be seen on Bitnodes.